"ZODL is to Zcash What Coinbase Was to Bitcoin" | Josh Swihart on ZEC’s Awakening

What happens when every payment, wallet, and onchain interaction becomes searchable by governments, companies, adversaries, and AI? Josh Swihart, founder and CEO of Zcash Open Development Lab, joins David to explain why Zcash is having a major privacy comeback, how ZODL and the Zashi wallet helped unlock real shielded adoption, why the shielded pool may be the most important ZEC metric, and what it will take for private money to become too big to kill.

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TIMESTAMPS

0:00 Intro
4:17 Privacy in the AI Era
6:19 Crypto’s Missing Privacy Layer
9:49 The Political Fight for Privacy
14:42 Can Crypto Retain Privacy?
16:47 From Zashi to ZODL
19:48 The Zcash Reawakening
21:41 Balaji, Funding, and the Mission
24:49 Product Market Fit for Shielded ZEC
27:51 ZODL's Role in the Zcash Stack
29:36 The Zcash Roadmap
32:56 What Is ZEC and is it Undervalued?
36:56 The Shielded Pool Explained
45:12 The $25M ZODL Raise
47:16 Compliance and Shielded ZEC
51:25 Institutions vs Cypherpunk Values
53:58 Personal Privacy in an AI World

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RESOURCES

Josh Swihart
https://x.com/jswihart

ZODL
https://x.com/zodl_app

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